


Seconds.

by gallifvrey



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (vaguely the doctor never explicitly talks about it), Canon Compliant, Dealing With Trauma, PTSD, Post-Episode: s09e11 Heaven Sent, primarily occurring during season 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 05:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17419712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifvrey/pseuds/gallifvrey
Summary: There's this emperor and he asks this shepherd's boy, how many seconds in eternity?An exploration of how the Doctor lives with what they experienced in Heaven Sent. A story about their struggles, rebirth, growth, healing.





	Seconds.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe there wasn't any mention about the experiences the Doctor had in Heaven Sent in any of the episodes! So heres a take on the more subtle ways the Doctor acts which may be impacted by the billions of years he spent inside of the confession dial.
> 
> this work was inspired by the post by [this post](https://yesokayiknow.tumblr.com/post/181335586395/anyway-i-just-rewatched-heaven-sent-and-i-have) by yesokayiknow!!

_That’s a hell of a bird._

 

The diamond shatters under his fist, bloody and bruised and he is finally, blessedly free.

 

He steps onto the red dusty ground of Gallifrey and all that he can think is _Clara._

 

He finds her, eventually, because what else is he going to do, and if he has to shoot someone to guarantee that she’ll stay by his side, then there’s no harm lost there, because he would do anything for her, whatever the cost.

 

Her prodding slowly becomes more insistent, though, as he’s running away, until she finally corners him in the Cloisters and asks him. He avoids the question, she asks the Time Lords that have found them.

 

_Four and a half billion years?_

 

Her voice is pained, shocked, heartbroken. It sounds as though she is grieving for all of the lives that he has lived, is living.

 

He never intended for her to feel this pain.

 

_“It’s ok,” he wants to say, “I don’t remember it anyway. I would do it again.”_

 

It’s not entirely true, of course. The memories are fragmented in his head, flashes occasionally when he doesn’t expect it. Even his brain, truly a marvel of biological engineering and capacities beyond any of his human companions, is not capable of handling the strain he’s putting on it. It’s not infinite, and he’s lived a near infinite number of lives.

 

He remembers, in flashes at a time, of the lives he lived. The horrors he endured.

 

Four and a half billion years, trapped in his own personal hell, by the people that he would have done anything for in a past life.

 

It’s too much to bear, even for him.

 

So instead he focuses on escaping, on finding a way out with Clara by his side and he takes a neural blocker to wipe her memory and that’ll be the end of that.

 

And then it isn’t.

 

He should have known, honestly, because he would have done the same thing and Clara is so, so similar to him (too similar, similar enough to get herself killed). She uses his sonic and reverses the polarity on the neural blocker and he knows as soon as she tells him, that it worked.

 

But it’s at that moment that he realizes that he’s gone too far.

 

_Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past._

 

_And she’s right, of course she is, she is always, always right, and gods he has certainly gone too far, hasn’t he._

 

He knows reversing the polarity worked, knows that it’ll shoot out into his own mind but he also knows that Clara would never truly forgive herself if she knew that she caused this. So he lies, because he is the Doctor and that’s what he does, he lies and smiles to her with too many teeth and it doesn’t reach his eyes and he smiles and the neural-blocker works and then he forgets.

 

He forgets about her and it’s sad, it’s a hole in his heart that he’s so desperately trying to fill, but it dulls the memories of the confession dial as well. The memories of the torture and the running and the always being chased are down to a dull throbbing in the back of his mind, so easy to ignore as opposed to the sharp, blinding pain he had been getting used to experiencing.

 

He moves on, has new adventures, meets Nardole and finds Missy and he saves her from execution and befriends this wonderful girl named Bill.

 

He moves on, and if he sometimes can’t sleep because he can’t stop thinking in 82 minute increments and how he needs to get up and _move_ before _it_ finds him, or if his heart rate will still sometimes go up at the sound of a fly buzzing, no one needs to know.

 

Bill doesn’t question when he shies away from physical contact, when he answers her questions about his past with dismissive remarks and only half truths. She prods only slightly about why he is still holding so close to Missy, despite all of the evil she has done, will do, probably is doing as they speak. (“ _Because,” he wants to say, “I need to know that someone, that one of my own people is still good. That they are not all out to kill me, torture me, that they don’t all have a personal vendetta against me.”)_

 

Despite his best effort, though, Bill dies, in a way that it far too horrible and graphic and what little is left of his heart shatters at seeing her converted into a Cyberman, of the knowledge of her waiting down on the bottom levels of the ship, alone, and so very, very scared.

 

Nardole, Missy, Bill, all dead at the bottom of a ship getting slowly sucked into a black hole and he thinks that maybe, maybe death wouldn’t be so bad. But he doesn’t die, in the end, never gets to die, when will he be allowed to die.

 

_Can’t I rest?_

 

Bill comes back in the end, as the Testimony, and she helps guide him to his own end, death, demise, rebirth.

 

_Memories. Important, right?_

 

And he wants to scream because yes, memories are important but not all of them are necessary and can’t he just _forget_ sometimes? But they come back anyway and he nearly starts crying at the sight of Clara, standing there so beautiful and back and a piece of his heart seems to heal again for one moment before all of those other memories come back too.

 

He starts to remember, then, being trapped in the confession dial and the billions of years and the running, so much running, in blinding detail and he’s not sure that he’s ever been more grateful for a regeneration.

 

Because regeneration can sometimes help with memories, often dampens the emotional response with the memories and he hopes, more than anything, that’ll be the case. That those memories will become less intense, powerful and overwhelming. That maybe he will be able to breathe.

 

Regeneration, though, is not always like that, and with traumatic enough memories they can stick around, through regeneration cycles, nestling themselves deep in the mind, ever-present, unable to be pushed away.

 

He stumbles back to the TARDIS, leaves a parting message for the person he is going to become next, because he knows it won’t be easy living in this mind. Worries about how he is going to manage it in the future, how he can live with himself now.

 

Regenerates with a plea to _just be kind_ on his lips.

 

And then, suddenly, she’s born. And instantly she’s flying out of the TARDIS and rushing towards planet Earth and her mind can only fixate on the leaps out of the tower window and into the dark pool of water and she thinks about how many times she’s survived that fall and wonders if she’ll survive this one.

 

She survives, of course, because why wouldn’t she? The universe seems particularly inclined to keep her alive.

 

For a second she wishes she didn’t.

 

She realizes quickly that she is stranded once again without the TARDIS and it feels like far too soon and far too much and she’s not sure what she’s going to do. She is angry, for a moment, because shouldn’t the TARDIS know what she’s been through, know not to leave her without a way out. She is trapped, again, on a planet with no escape.

 

She meets some friends, though, and the first woman that she sees, Grace is so kind and sweet and so, so brave that Grace gets herself killed and she wonders how she is going to live with herself because she’s been alive for only a few hours and already someone has died because of her.

 

She’s the Doctor, and she saves people, except when she doesn’t.

 

She itches to run but she doesn’t, can’t, so she waits, then, sticks around with her new friends and goes to Grace’s funeral because what else is she going to do, other than linger in the shadows, just in case they need her. She waits until they seem to start doing better, enlists their help in just one more thing because she thinks she knows where the TARDIS is and her heart is racing because she would do _anything_ to get back to the TARDIS and if she can just get there and then -

 

Then they’re on an alien planet and she’s made a couple of new friends, or at the very least people who are on the planet with her as well, but this planet is specifically chosen to kill them and she doesn’t know how she is going to keep her friends safe except she is the Doctor and that’s what she does. She’s the Doctor, and she saves people.

 

_Maybe one day, if she repeats that long enough and says it loud enough, maybe the universe will finally listen._

 

Except it’s night time and there are sniper bots roaming around the inside tunnels and the Remnants are everywhere threatening to suffocate them and this is an impossible scenario and she can’t figure out a solution and her mind is racing.

 

They climb out into the night and there are Remnants everywhere, they are circling around her instantly and when she looks at them out of the corner of her eye she thinks that she sees a dead woman wrapped in loose robes crawling towards her, she thinks she hears flies buzzing, and she can’t breathe. For a second all she can think is, _if I can just come up with enough of a truth for it to leave me alone, maybe, maybe I can live another day_.

 

The Remnants force themselves inside of her mind and start digging around her past and her future and she knows how to deal with this so she shuts them out as quickly as she can and hisses _get out of my head_ because she can and they will. She tells Graham to snap his fingers as the lighter flies into the sky and her back hits the ground and for a moment all she can think is that the flames look just like regeneration energy.

 

They survive the night and go to where the Ghost Monument should be and there’s nothing there and all she can think is how she failed them _again_ , how they’re going to die on this planet with three humans so far from home (again). (This is why she shouldn’t take them anywhere, didn’t mean to take them anywhere, but the universe has a way of getting them in the most dangerous situations).

 

She can’t figure out a way out of this, she is stranded again, trapped on a planet with no way out except survival and it feels achingly familiar. (Feels an itch inside of her to keep moving, that she needs to run, needs to do _something._ 82 minutes of rest before she needs to go).

 

The TARDIS comes, eventually, and she’s giddy with relief, because she’ll be able to save her friends, maybe even save herself, but as she walks up to it she starts to feel some dread, memories of the state she was in the last time she was in there come flooding back. She is nervous to think what the inside must be like now. (She can fix it, though, she always can. Give her some tools and a bit of time and the TARDIS will be as good as new.)

 

She used to like gears and clocks, in a previous lifetime, used to plaster them everywhere and then put hints of it everywhere else; the roundels, the endless ticking of a clock hanging somewhere but never seen. She’s not sure if she can see that again, too many bad memories tied to the endless looping of a clock, but as she steps into the TARDIS she sees it is more perfect than she could have ever hoped.

 

The inside is organic and has soft colors, organic pillars and architecture, and most importantly no corners, no clocks, the ticking is gone and she doesn’t feel the need to run. The console has a custard creme dispenser and when she touches the console the TARDIS responds with sympathy and an _I’m sorry for leaving you_ and she’s nearly brought to tears because maybe this represents healing, maybe she’ll finally be safe, her friends will be safe, she has her TARDIS and maybe she’ll be okay. 

* * *

 

They’ve never liked being touched; in their past body they were almost comically against it, but through Clara’s surprise hugs and River’s loving embraces they learned to accept it, even to enjoy the contact.

 

It only took four and a half billion years to ruin that.

 

She and her friends are in 1955 in Alabama, in a motel room with a police officer who they’re just trying to get to leave and Graham puts his hand on her shoulder and for a moment it is too old and wrinkly and she thinks that she can hear flies buzzing and her hearts are racing and she can’t breathe and then she remembers, _Graham_ , and _safe_ , and she shrugs his hand off because she can do that.

 

This happens a few more times, before her companions learn to not touch her. Ryan trying to grab her hand in the midst of an adventure and Yaz trying to give her a hug after a particularly scary one. Each time she freezes, stands still and mind starts racing for some truth she can say to get _it_ to leave before she remembers that they’re human, safe, warm, soft.

 

She learns she’s okay with touching as long as she initiates it, she starts to give out awkward pats and even more awkward hugs and she realizes that maybe the problem isn’t touch but rather control, and maybe if she can just control this one thing, maybe she’ll learn to be okay again.

 

They make it out of Alabama, save history, and then they’re off again, into life threatening danger, because she’s the Doctor and danger follows her like a shadow.

 

Stop off in Sheffield, just to drop off her friends but when she is about to leave they come back to her, declare that they want to be with her, even knowing the risks, knowing the dangers of traveling with her. She wants to tell them to leave, to run away and never look back while they are still _breathing_ (not dead, on the bottom of a spaceship, or stranded in a parallel universe, or stuck between one heartbeat and the next) but she’s selfish, too selfish so she lets them stay.

 

 _You won’t be the same person as you were when you left,_ she says, as though that’ll make it better, as though that assuages the uncertainty of whether or not they’ll survive the adventures they have. She doesn’t push it - barely argues with them as they look up at her with bright, shining, young eyes, brimming with excitement and _hope_ , and she almost feels shame at parading around, acting as though the universe is so perfect.

 

They never used to like sleeping, especially not in front of their friends, companions, there was always too much to do, too much to see, too much vulnerability in sleep. Their companions found it amusing, endearing, even slightly concerning, about how little they would sleep. They’d brush it off as a quirk of Time Lord biology, claim that they took catnaps during lulls in conversation but the truth was just that they never managed to get a lot of rest.

 

But now, now she barely sleeps at all, if she can help it. Time Lords need only an hour of sleep a day but she stretches that far past its limits, can only get half an hour at a time before she jerks awake, panting, and the nightmares of ticking clocks and the thought of _eighty-two minutes_ in her mind and that she needs to get up and move, run, before _it_ can catch her.

 

She fell asleep for the longest period of time that she has in many years right out of regeneration and when she wakes she discovers that she and all the new humans she met have all been fitted with DNA bombs and she swears to herself that she’ll never be that careless again.

 

(She repeats that to herself, over and over again, as though that is the only reason why she isn’t sleeping).

 

30 minutes, once a day, often while her friends are asleep too and usually just in the midst of whatever tinkering she’s doing, tangled in wires, nestled in the TARDIS, and it works, she’s fine, until she isn’t. She finally breaks down, and the TARDIS nudges her towards her bedroom (been ages since she’s been in there, she’s nervous about the state that she’ll find it in but when she opens the door it’s clean and comforting, filled with trinkets that have nice memories attached to them and a huge window above her bed, showing her the nebula they’re floating through), brings her to her bedroom tells her that she’ll be safe, and her friends are safe, they’re all going to be okay.

 

She collapses on the soft bed and sleeps fitfully, full of nightmares and dreams of falling, falling, falling so far and without an end.

 

She still wakes up in only slightly over an hour (63 minutes, exactly, her brain supplies) and she can feel her body wishing that it got more sleep, more rest, but she can only think that she needs to be moving, any time that she stands still, even for a moment, is when _it_ can come and find her and she _needs_ to move.

 

They go visit a junk planet, searching for something and finding nothing, nothing until Graham finds _something_ , a sonic bomb, and then - there is nothing.

 

She wakes up in a sterile white room and she doesn’t know where she is and when Astos tells her it’s been four days she can’t breathe and she realizes she’s on a ship and she needs - she needs to turn around because God knows how far away they are from the TARDIS and she can’t leave the TARDIS behind again, can’t be separated again.

 

She’s ready to fight her way through the ship, turn it around and damn the other patients because after all this time isn’t she allowed to be selfish, sometimes? Allowed to finally just get what she wants? She can’t, in the end, would never actually risk the lives of so many just for her own needs, so instead she waits, gets back to the TARDIS the long-way-round because she’s the Doctor and that’s what she does.

 

In the end, she saves the day, gets rid of the Pting and almost, almost everyone is safe. Except for Eve, who dies the same way she lived, using her dying breath to pilot the ship, making sure everyone can get back safely. It’s the best way she could have died, and it doesn’t make it any easier. (She’s the Doctor, and she saves people, unless this is the way they want to die.)

 

_“A good death. Is that the best they can hope for?”_

_“A good death is the best anyone can hope for.”_

_and they say that so harshly that they hope that maybe Clara will believe them and maybe they’ll believe themselves and then they save the day and make a poor girl immortal because surely, no death is better than a good death (“Unless you happen to be immortal.”)._

 

Eve dies saving the ship and her brother brings them the rest of the way, and when she disembarks she gets the quickest shuttle back to where the TARDIS is because she is so tired of waiting, tired of just letting the universe take her where it needs to go.

 

She used to be so good at waiting, willing to do whatever it takes, however long it takes, just to save a few lives. Waits over 300 years to protect the town of Christmas, and four and a half billion years just to bring Clara back and now she is tired of waiting.

 

Even standing around is harder, she was, is, always fidgety, but now it’s even more extreme; constantly moving and twitching and jumping, tapping something (can’t rest, can’t stop, otherwise _it_ will get to her, find her). It’s always erratic, meaningless, random patterns in her head but sometimes, sometimes when she is exceptionally stressed or nervous about something the taps start to follow a pattern, the same pattern that she has known her entire life, and she’s tapping it out.

 

One-two-three-four.

 

The heartbeat of a Time Lord.

 

_Four knocks, the sound of two heartbeats, following her around the universe. She’s scared to learn what it might mean._

 

She keeps moving, she’s tired of being stuck and waiting so she leaves, gets back to the TARDIS and runs away.

 

They go to Punjab in 1947 and they visit Yaz’s grandmother and she meets the Thijarians, the last of their kind, living out their days documenting and honoring the dead and it finally feels like there might be some good in the universe.

 

But when they catch her, at first, take her from her friends, she doesn’t feel honored, feels trapped instead. She jumps straight to being murdered because that’s what it feels like the universe has in store for her, wishes nothing but for her to die (over, and over, and over again).

 

She can’t save everyone for as much as she might try to and she doesn’t let her companions see her face as they walk away and hear that shot and she doesn’t let them see how shaken she is by Prem’s death. Outrage has never solved any problems, but neither have any of her other solutions, most of the time, but she wasn’t about to stop trying.

 

She’s the Doctor, and she saves people, except for when the universe demands that they die.

 

_“It has to happen,” she tells Yaz, pleading that she’ll understand, “otherwise the whole fabric of time might crumble! You might not exist, and we can’t have a world with no Yaz!” and she hopes that it’s enough to convince her, to convince herself. One life for another, simple arithmetic, intertwined with the ebbing and flowing of time itself._

 

She moves on, in the end, because she has to and because there is no other choice. Drags her friends along on other adventures because maybe if they keep moving long enough the pain will never sink in.

 

Graham wants to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the First so they go to England and the TARDIS never listens so they end up in the middle of the height of the witch trials and she should have expected as much as to be tried as a witch, she’s never been particularly good at blending in anyway.

 

She’s tied to a tree in the center of town but no one’s around because they’re all busy celebrating and King James is there and he’s so confident and she just wants to find the right thing to say because maybe then he’ll give her the sonic and she can escape, be free from the very physical shackles keeping her from moving.

 

_Just as you hide behind the Doctor, perhaps._

 

He says and he smiles and she can only think about her past life where she screamed, “ _The Doctor is no longer here, you are stuck with me,”_ and how she had gone so, so far, and thinks that maybe the Doctor is a title that protects the universe more than it protects her, and maybe it’s not just a reminder of how she needs to act in the face of the universe but also a reminder of how the universe does not treat her nearly well enough to make up for all that she’s doing for it.

 

She doesn’t make it out so she gets tied to a ducking stool and she’s so conscious of the water beneath her and how her hands are tied sharply behind her and she’s talking at a million words a minute, trying again to just say the right thing, maybe if she can just say the right thing then Becka will let her go. It doesn’t work, doesn’t work and she is falling backwards right into the water.

 

For a moment, she thinks she can feel skulls on the bottom, taste the saltwater on her tongue as she tries to gasp. It takes her a minute before she realizes that they’re just smooth rocks and another minute after that to remember that she has a respiratory bypass system but it only works if she just _remembers to use it._

 

Chains undone, breath held, and she makes it out of the water and faces her friends and makes a joke and doesn’t tell them how close she was to drowning.

 

She’s off, again, in the TARDIS and running away, and they land in Norway, and there’s a girl who is so scared and missing her father and she wishes that she could just fix it. She discovers the Solitract and Yaz and Graham follow dutifully behind her as they explore the cavern and make their way into the other world.

 

Graham is being wooed by his wife - not-wife, dying, cancerous universe depiction of Grace just to try to get him to stay, and she realizes that she’s trapped them all in a universe that is destined to kill them.

 

She doesn’t know how she’s going to get them out this time, stands in the room trying to think of another plan and whispers, I’m really sacred, full of truth that she’d never usually admit in hopes that the Solitract would go easy on her, maybe let them free.

 

Grant them another chance.

 

She never did like lying, despite how good at it she had gotten and how often she did it, but she has now been trained by the best to be scared of telling a lie, and instead she learned how to weaponize half-truths, say just enough truth to get herself out of whatever predicament she’s in this time but not enough so that anyone actually _sees_ her.

 

She figures out a way out, pleads with the Solitract to let Graham go but it’s only after he lets Grace go that he’s free. Erik refuses because he is too clueless of the larger ramifications and too hopefully in love with this thing that he so desperately wants to be his wife, and she knows the feeling far too much and that’s why she can’t blame him, not really, no matter how much she wants to.

 

He grips onto the last remaining memory of the woman that he lost and she understands, and so instead she makes herself more valuable to the Solitract, sacrifices herself instead.

 

She’s the Doctor, and she saves people, even if it means sacrificing herself.

 

The universe goes white and she is stranded now, alone and so far away from her own universe and as she tries to explain to the Solitract what makes her universe so brilliant she remembers why she is has always, and is always, going to be in love with it.

 

She makes it back, in the end, and she leaves, again, goes with her friends on another adventure and she meets Tzim-Sha, again. He tries to break her with the knowledge that he is going to kill planet Earth just to get her to do what he wants but he doesn’t understand, she’s been broken for so long. It’s really just her friends that she’s worried about now.

 

She saves the day, uses the neural-transmitters to block the signal, saves the Ux and brings the planets back home.

 

No casualties, not even Tzim-Sha, who ends up trapped in a stasis pod of his own making for the rest of eternity. She tries not to feel bad for him, he murdered thousands and was going to murder billions more and doesn’t he deserve it, then?

 

(She has killed more than he has, she was trapped in her own personal hell for eternity, does she not deserve it too?)

 

She finishes with the Ux, and then she’s off, the Doctor and her TARDIS and all her friends, racing around the universe. Finding a distress call, landing where they’re needed, saving the day, and then running away. Clockwork.

 

Over, and over, and over again.

 

Constantly running, stumbling throughout the universe.

 

Because if she stops, even for one moment, _it_ might find her.

 

_He asks this Shepherd’s boy, how many seconds in eternity?_

 

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr! gallifvrey.tumblr.com


End file.
